The Push (El Gardener Book 2)

by Natalie Edwards

  So this is the back office, is it? Kat thought now. Explains why you didn’t want to do your own bloody filing.

  “Miss Salter,” she began to the lunatic with the musket, “I can assure you…”

  “You can drop all that Miss Salter rubbish,” the lunatic told her, keeping her ridiculous weapon trained on the space between Kat’s eyebrows. “And that accent, while you’re at it. I don’t know what you’re up to, but I know a Scouser when I hear one, and you’re about as Scouse as I am Puerto Rican.”

  “Miss Salter…,” she started, then paused.

  Bad idea, she thought. When you’re in a hole, stop fucking digging.

  “Alright,” she said, letting Faye Tuttle fall away and hoping the lunatic would prove more amenable to a real Welsh lilt than the high, flat notes of her faux-Scouse. “Got me there, haven’t you? I never was that good at dialects.”

  Neither the lunatic nor the gun moved a millimetre.

  “Let’s have it, then,” the lunatic said. “Who are you?”

  Thinking on her feet: that was another skill Kat hadn’t lost yet.

  A bit of unsolved mystery, she thought. That’s what we need here. An unanswered question - something to get her wondering, get her to drop her guard while she asks herself whether or not what I’m telling her might be true.

  “I’m an investigator,” she said, looking the lunatic straight in her mad, wide eyes. “A private investigator, you know?”

  “Investigating what?” the lunatic asked. She didn’t believe what she was hearing, not quite - but there was a note of doubt in there, something that suggested to Kat that she might be open to persuasion, if the story she was told held up.

  “The Wainwright baby. The kidnapping. I can’t tell you who hired me, I’d lose my licence. But my client… they think there’s more to it than the official story let on. More than what they were told at the time. They think…”

  She hesitated - another, altogether more audacious idea coming to her as she spun the tale.

  “They think,” she said, “that she’s still alive - the baby. That whoever took her never killed her. Just hid her away somewhere.”

  She’d expected – had hoped - that this new nugget of information would give the lunatic pause; cause her, if nothing else, to lower the barrel of the gun just enough for Kat to duck out of the way and, if her mutinous legs would carry her fast enough, barrel out the door and slam it shut behind her.

  Instead, the old psycho smiled: a broad, gummy grin that stretched the loose skin of her lower jaw all the way back to her earlobes.

  “I knew it!” she cackled, triumphantly. “I said, didn’t I? I said she weren’t dead. Not one of them bastards believed me, but I said! He never would’ve killed her, I told ‘em so. Not his own flesh and blood. Took her off and away, that’s what he’d have done. And he did, didn’t he? He did!”

  Now she lowered the gun; took her yellow-nailed knot of a finger off the trigger.

  “Sorry I startled you, cock,” she said, friendly again, the feral grin now directed Kat’s way. “But you can’t be too careful, when you get people coming to the door.”

  “Not to worry,” Kat murmured, entirely mystified by the turn the situation seemed to be taking but still acutely aware that the gun, while no longer in her line of sight, remained very much in the frame. “I’d have done the same, I’m sure.”

  “This investigation you’re doing - is that what you wanted to talk to me for?”

  Kat nodded in the affirmative - afraid that anything she said might lead the conversation back down another dark path, one possibly terminating in the unloading of an antique firearm into her forehead.

  “I’ll tell you this, then,” the lunatic said. “You’ve come to the right place. Forty two years I’ve been waiting for someone to turn up here asking about that kiddie. So in you come, and I’ll get us a brew on. There’s a lot I’ve got to say.”

  “I was older than Bobby,” she told Kat, when the tea had been made and the blunderbuss, now divested of ammunition, had been tucked away in its resting place beside the Aga. “A fair bit older. Could’ve been his mam, if I’d had him early. His actual Mam were my Dad’s little sister, and there were fifteen years between the two of them. You got big families, in them days.”

  “He was never much for school, Bobby, but he loved plants - growing ‘em, tending to ‘em, all of it. Proper green-fingered, he was. Not light-fingered - not like his Dad.”

  “Bit of a criminal, the dad, was he?” Kat asked, sensing that some response was expected of her. “Bit dodgy?”

  Lucille Salter snorted.

  “They all were,” she said. “Every one of them Kingsleys. Thieves and drunks, the lot of them. Not Bobby, though - he was different. More like his Mam. And when he got that job in the garden up at the Wainwrights… well, it was just right, if you know what I mean. You’d never seen him so happy.”

  Bob Kingsley’s first gardening job, taken up a day shy of his nineteenth birthday, was with the old Mr Wainwright - Ted Wainwright’s father, over in Wetherby. He’d done well there: kept the rose bushes blooming, the weeds in check, the little hedge maze symmetrical, and - most importantly, at least in the eyes of Wainwright Senior, who secretly feared them - the wider grounds clear of marauding muntjac deer. He was well-liked, and his work roundly respected, and it came as no surprise to anyone that, when the younger Mr Wainwright announced his engagement to a girl he’d met on business in Cheshire, Bob was offered a pay rise and his own small cottage on site in exchange for following young Ted and his bride-to-be to their new house on the outskirts of Burn Bridge.

  “Bobby hadn’t met the girl when he agreed to it,” Lucille Salter said. “I think if he had, if he’d known… he wouldn’t have took the job.”

  It was when he did meet her, finally - when Ted Wainwright returned to Harrogate with Gillian, his new wife - that Bob’s trouble began.

  “He was taken with her from the start,” said Lucille. “Smitten, he was. Mooning around like a love-sick puppy. None of us knew what was wrong with him, first off - I thought he might be taking ill, he was that bad. But then he had a few too many down the pub one night with our Kenneth - my brother that was, may he rest in peace - and it all came tumbling out of him. How he’d known from the moment he clamped eyes on her that she was it, this Gillian; she was the one. How he couldn’t stop thinking about her, no matter what hour of the day or night. And how it was him she was supposed to be with, not Ted Wainwright.”

  “It was all one-sided, or so our Kenneth thought - a bit of an infatuation, no real harm in it. But then old Noreen Wicklow, her that used to do the cooking up at the Wainwright house… she said she’d seen the two of them together, Bobby and young Mrs Wainwright. Together, together. Up in the master bedroom one lunchtime, when Ted was out doing one of his factory visits.”

  Neither Bob nor Gillian - Mrs Wainwright - had known they’d been seen. But Noreen Wicklow wasn’t known for her discretion, and it wasn’t long before the local tongues were wagging.

  “I don’t know how it didn’t get back to young Ted,” Lucille said. “Or maybe it did, and he ignored it. Some men are like that, aren’t they, duck? Hear what they want to hear, and filter out the rest. Any road, he never said anything, if he did hear it, and he was always nice as pie to Bobby when he saw him.”

  “And then she went and fell pregnant, didn’t she?”

  It was Bob Kingsley’s baby. That was the opinion of the village - if not of Ted Wainwright, who waited hand and foot on his wife for the duration of the pregnancy, bringing her cups of tea in bed and calling the housekeeper to check up on her whenever he was out travelling.

  “None of us asked our Bobby outright,” Lucille said. “But it was obvious he thought it was his, the baby, from the way he was flouncing around - beaming his head off, pleased as punch. You’d tell him he looked happy, just to test the waters and see if he’d let you in on it himself, but he’d just give you this smile, all enigmatic - like he had a
secret, but he weren’t about to share it with you. Bit worrying, it was, to tell you the truth. It was all well and good him getting excited about having a little one on the way - but what was he supposed to do after it was born, eh? I mean, even if it was his, technically - that baby was going to grow up a Wainwright, wasn’t it? And there’d be nothing he could do about it.”

  But Bob Kingsley’s smile didn’t slip, not even when the baby was born and christened Ingrid, after Ted Wainwright’s grandmother. He continued to strut about the village like the cock of the walk, giving no outward indication of displeasure that his putative daughter was fed and changed and swaddled every night by another man while his lover, the mother of that putative child, slept and woke in that same man’s arms.

  Until the day he announced that he was leaving Yorkshire for a job in London - not at the end of the month, once he’d picked up his final pay packet from the Wainwrights, but that very weekend, taking the Pullman to King’s Cross out of Harrogate station on the Saturday morning with nothing but a suitcase and the clothes on his back.

  “Just like that,” Lucille said. “He’d never told us he’d applied for any job down south, neither. If you ask me, there wasn’t one. He just wanted folk to think there was, and that he was out of the picture, so’s nobody’d point the finger at him for what came after.”

  “What?” asked Kat. “The kidnapping?”

  “I shouldn’t call it that, duck. It’s not kidnapping when it’s your own baba, is it?”

  “But you think it was him that took her?”

  Lucille Salter chewed this over.

  “I can’t prove anything,” she said. “Close as we were - or close as him and Kenneth were, anyway - I didn’t see hide nor hair of Bobby again after he left on that train. Didn’t hear from him, neither - hear from him or hear of him, not until the day he died and one of the Kingsley nephews down in London rang to ask us to the funeral. 1967, that was, and him just thirty five. Lymphoma. It’s a bloody crab, cancer, right enough. Gets its claws in you and never lets go.”

  “What can’t you prove?” Kat pressed.

  “There never was a ransom note, you know,” Lucille continued, apparently oblivious to the question. “Folk ‘round here had it in their heads there was going to be one, that whoever it was that took her did it for a chunk of Ted Wainwright’s inheritance. And it was a puzzle, right enough. But not for what they reckoned. ‘Cause do you know what I think happened, duck? I think they planned it - our Bobby and that Gillian. Staged the whole thing to make it look like a kidnapping, so he could take the little one off somewhere. Set it up so’s the three of them could get away together, out of Harrogate, and start afresh with poor Ted’s money as a cushion.”

  Kat thought this through. The tale made sense, in its way: Bob Kingsley was never going to make a packet as a gardener, and Mrs Wainwright must have been used to a certain standard of living that her lover could never have afforded to maintain without another income stream, not with a young child to feed, and especially not down in London. There was a simplicity to it; a sort of coherence that she could easily find compelling.

  But it didn’t fit the facts, was the problem, at least not as she’d understood them.

  “What cushion?” she said. “What money are we talking about, if there wasn’t a ransom?”

  Lucille grimaced.

  “Like I said, I can’t prove it,” she replied. “And maybe you’re sat here thinking I’m nowt but a lonely old woman cooking up some cockeyed story to keep her mind from wandering. But I think they meant to send a ransom note, at first. If you ask me, that was the plan from the off: that Bobby and his mates would break in and take that little girl, rough Ted up a bit to make it look proper, then tell him he could have her back if he paid up. And then, when all the fuss died down and Bobby’d got his sackful of money, him and that Gillian and the baby would’ve been all set to run off together into the sunset and leave Ted Wainwright crying into his porridge.”

  “But they didn’t, is my point,” Kat insisted. “There never was a ransom. Nobody paid up, the kid stayed missing, and Gillian Wainwright topped herself, didn’t she? Took a swan-dive into the river.”

  “Show a bit of respect, won’t you, duck? I might not have cared for her or what she did to my Bobby, but the girl’s dead, right enough. Whatever wrong she did, she’s paid for it now.”

  “What do you mean?” Kat said. It was becoming her mantra, she realised; her constant refrain, in this increasingly strange exchange that wasn’t quite a conversation. “What do you think she did?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” the old woman replied. “She got cold feet. Planned the whole thing with Bobby, told him just what to do and why. Then at the very last, just when he’d got the baba stashed away somewhere and he was all set to tell Ted Wainwright where to drop off the money… she changed her mind.”

  Chapter 23

  Bromley, London

  August 1997

  Harriet knew about coercive control - about gaslighting, and lovebombing, and battered woman syndrome, and the hundred adjacent behaviours and responses that fell broadly under the unhappy umbrella of domestic abuse.

  Her father had been - though she’d been mid-way through her first degree before she’d put a name to it - an archetypal abuser, maintaining his psychological hold over her mother, and by extension her mother’s money, through an unpredictable combination of praise and punishment, silence and carefully modulated rage that left no-one listening in any doubt that she’d let him down, let the children down, let herself down.

  Elizabeth Marchant was a lonely woman, brittle and easily flustered and not - in Harriet’s opinion - particularly easy to like. But she was coming on, in the tiniest of increments, since her husband’s vanishing: joining a book club, learning to swim with a group of other older women in the pools at Hampstead Heath, collecting and displaying the absurd Tarot decks she loved but had always felt compelled to stow away in drawers and hidden cupboards around the house while Harriet’s father was on the scene.

  The woman facing Harriet across the doorway of this house, by contrast - if the information she’d learned since her meeting with Briscoe was accurate, and if Harriet’s own judgement could be trusted – remained very firmly in the grip of her absent captor. She was small, the woman, and skinny verging on skeletal, but gave the impression of willing herself to become smaller still, to minimise the space she took up in the world. Her skin was tanned an artificial shade of orange, her hair white-blonde and thinning slightly at the crown and temples - from malnutrition, was Harriet’s guess. In the glaring midday sun, the bones in her chest and shoulders leapt out from the neckline of her denim dress in such stark, painful detail that it took great effort not to look away.

  Chronologically, Harriet knew, she was in her mid to late forties, if Winston Redfearn’s estimation of her age when he’d met her in the early ‘70s had been accurate; on appearances alone she could have been sixty.

  “Lois Soames?” she asked - sounding, she was acutely aware, very much like the visiting social workers, neighbourhood police and parole officers that were almost certainly a fixture of the woman’s everyday life.

  “Is this about the Fiesta?” the woman replied, her accent as thick as Ruby Redfearn’s but her voice more timid by far. “Because they told me I had ’til Monday, and my Income Support don’t come in until the end of the week.”

  Diplomacy had never been Harriet’s forte; even in interviews and focus groups, her preferred style was bluntness rather than prevarication. There was no benefit, she’d learned in almost a decade of working with charismatic sociopaths and men with aggressive Antisocial Personality Disorders so extreme they’d pull your eyeballs from their sockets with their fingernails if they suspected you’d wronged them, in telling lies or making false promises, if there was any chance at all they’d be exposed.

  For this task, though, Rose had been clear that tact, and politeness, and sensitivity - even outright lies, should they be required - w
ere an absolute necessity. And since Harriet had no interest in doing anything that might harm Rose or Sophie or their interests, even where those interests extended to little Ruby Redfearn and her Merry Women, it was in the spirit of politeness and sensitivity that she responded.

  “No, Mrs Soames,” she said. “It’s nothing to do with cars. I’m here about Charles. Your husband.”

  The woman’s face fell; became a mask of terror.

  “Charlie?” she said, the words tumbling incoherently out of her as panic took hold. “What’s happened? Has something happened to him? Oh, God - it has, hasn’t it? I knew it, I knew it would if I weren’t there to look after him…”

  Harriet felt herself stiffen; felt disgust take hold of her, revulsion at the woman’s weakness.

  He hits you and bites you and does Christ knows what else to you, and this is how you react when you think he might be dead? she thought, in what she’d come to recognise as her father’s voice - the cold, pitiless judgement of a man with no patience at all for frailty. It’s pathetic, just absolutely pathetic. Pull yourself together, for God’s sake, before you embarrass yourself any more than you have already.

  They were meaningless - the thoughts, the voice. She’d learned that too, through her research as much as through the endless rounds of mandatory therapy she’d had to work through before they’d given her her PhD. They were just thoughts; just memories. They weren’t her.

  But hearing them, acknowledging them, needing to tell herself they were meaningless whenever they struck - it was exhausting, an incessant cycle of listen and recognise and accept and move on. She’d like, just occasionally, to be able to stop; for her own mind to let her be.

  “He’s fine, Mrs Soames,” she said, straining to infuse her words with kindness, with an un-Marchant-like note of sympathy. “Nothing’s wrong. I wanted a quick word with you, that’s all. I’m working with the probation service, and they like to drop in every now and then on clients and their families for the first year or two after release. Just to make sure everything’s going alright.”